>>9
I suppose this is a bit of a "lose-lose" situation, since if I now go on to explain why I WASN'T being pompous and condescending, then that's being pompous and condescending.
But since, yes, I guess I DO have an EENTSY inclination in that direction, I WILL point out that:
The pontificating about what "Rutger Hauer" could possibly and could not possibly have said was, far from being a condescension toward you, a condescension toward myself, i.e. a bit of self-deprecating humour at the expense of my own deficiencies.
That Rutger Hauer DID himself compose the "attack ships on fire off the shores of Orion" speech is one of the things I have very definitely LEARNT in the "Crackyverse" - and I don't consider it to be a merely trivial thing, as I remember being moved by the speech, at age 20 or 21 when the movie came out, to a degree that I'd been moved by few things I've encountered in the cinema.
(It's poetry of an equal rank with Rimbaud's
"Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré ! Les Aubes sont navrantes.
Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer :
L'âcre amour m'a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes.
Ô que ma quille éclate ! Ô que j'aille à la mer !" and certainly better than anything of that poet's that was included in the rather bad movie of his life that was made around that time with Sylvester Stallone in the title role).
The first time I saw a post on Crackyhouse directing me to a site where the information was given that those lines were NOT actually in Dick's book and that Hauer had improvised them on set, I don't think I was even being ironical in replying "What? A guy who looks like THAT can have and express emotions like THOSE?" But I followed the link and was able to indeed assure myself that the lines ARE Hauer's. Since then, any allusions on my part to "This will all be lost, like tears in rain" etc. tend to be allusions to how I have been forced indeed to recognize that there are certain limits to my purported omniscience and that I suffer from the prejudices natural to an unathletic, cerebral guy who has suffered all his life from a seething resentment against the athletic and the physically impressive.
And yes, of course, I'm back deep in the no-win double-bind right now, because I've just taken up, talking about myself, several inches of space on .71 that could have been used for arguing about child pornography.
I don't know how much of an asshole that makes me.
But then, who does?